One year ago, we felt with you the pride of seeing a powerful anti-fascist movement rise up against a far-right and white-supremacist gathering in Virginia.

We also felt the terrible sadness of seeing a young woman who stood up against all forms of discrimination murdered by fascist hatred: Heather Heyer, this shining face, this strong and at the same time calm determination to refuse the unacceptable. Too much light, too much determination…

This is the same hate that in Paris in 2013 killed Clément Méric, an 18-year-old syndicalist and anti-fascist militant.

Elsewhere in Europe, fascism or state repression have claimed the lives of Carlos Palomino, Pavlos Fyssas, Carlo Giuliani, Renato Biagetti, Dax, and so many other young people whose names will forever be associated with the struggle for a world liberated from white supremacy, bigotry, and social injustice.

We write from France as the mothers of young militants who have suffered violence or repression as a result of their activism.

Like Susan Bro, Heather’s mother, we are proud of the struggles of our children.

We know that they pay, or risk paying, very dearly for their refusal of an unjust society that is imposed upon them by the powerful. Death, violence, criminal charges, imprisonment… They are familiar with all of this. We have lived it alongside them.

And we affirm as loudly and as strongly as we can, a thousand times over, that our children are right for fighting back!

Our own struggle, as their mothers, is to bring attention to their words—words too often neglected, deformed, or caricatured.

The fight against the vision of the world spread by the far right must be the business of every generation, each one in its own way.

Mothers from Italy and Spain, whose parents knew fascism and Francoism, have shown us the path forward.

Alongside them, we are in the process of forming an International Network of Anti-Fascist Mothers in order to mutually support one another and to be present wherever struggles are taking place.

We are organizing to support everyday struggles in the neighborhoods targeted by racists, in the schools, and in the prisons; as well as the mobilizations that the entire world will be watching, such as that of this weekend, August 11-12, 2018, in Charlottesville.

We are pleased to associate ourselves with this great movement of resistance, to which your courage has summoned us. We send you our gratitude.

Collectif des Mères Solidaires//Solidarity Mothers

Meres-Solidaires@riseup.net

Collectif des Mères Solidaires: Who We Are

A collective to support victims of fascism and state repression.

We live in a Europe that boasts of being a haven of peace, freedom, prosperity, and justice, built upon the blood shed by the partisans during the battles to liberate it from fascism. However, our children, engaged in various social and political struggles, are beaten, arrested, sentenced, and in some cases killed by state authorities or fascists.

We, their mothers, affirm that the politics conducted by the governments of Europe are responsible, directly or indirectly, for this:

By thwarting our children’s aspirations to transform our societies and standing in the way of experimentation with alternative models founded on cooperation and self-organization.

By ignoring calls to respect human rights and the earth in order to defend the economic interests of the wealthy, exacerbating social injustices in their own countries and throughout the world.

By provoking hopelessness throughout society, by encouraging fear of foreigners, by tolerating or allying themselves with violent movements of the extreme right, they facilitate the resurgence of fascism that terrorizes and kills.

Exercising their freedoms of expression and of struggle, our children denounce injustice, discrimination, and the unrestrained capitalism that is ravaging the world. They defend their rights and those of the most marginalized. They fight against all forms of the drift towards fascism. They struggle for a world based in solidarity, openness, and respect for the environment.

Because they dare to take a stand against the state, they are considered a threat. And they face disproportionate repression from:

Police forces that use instruments of death, beatings, and arrests against those who don’t present any real danger;

A justice system that enables police impunity and mobilizes any means at its disposal, particularly imprisonment, against those who it wants to silence;

A prison system that violates the most basic human rights.

The state institutes these police, judicial, and carceral forms of violence as its normal mode of functioning to serve the powerful and to criminalize social, environmental, and political struggles.

Because we have raised them with the values of truth, solidarity, justice, and freedom, we, their mothers, demand justice and freedom for our children.

We denounce:

The fact that these states designate them as enemies of the Republic and of democracy, and seek to paralyze them through intimidation;

The violence and repression that is exercised against them;

The fact that these states tolerate the existence of fascist or neo-Nazi groups and on occasion guarantee them impunity.

Faced with the powerlessness of individual protest, we unite our voices so that those of our children may be heard. We share the struggles of other mothers, in Europe and throughout the world. We help and support one another.

We will neither forget nor abandon one another. We will not allow our devastated hearts to be engulfed by the silence of the cemetery or crushed by the humiliation of prisons.

For mothers like us, the slums where the children of migrants face discrimination, the refugee camps and the detention centers where those fleeing poverty, war, or political repression in their country are humiliated—these will always be spaces of mobilization.

And the anniversaries of the deaths of our children will always remind us of the urgent necessity of struggle.

A year after the fascist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that left one dead and countless injured, we can see how fascists, police, centrists, and others have learned from experience and adjusted their strategies. Have those of us who oppose the rise of fascism done the same?

For more background on the events of August 2017 in Charlottesville, consult the reading list at the end.

The Fascists and Far Right

Some fascist organizations disintegrated after the debacle in Charlottesville, and many still haven’t recovered. Patriot Prayer was in disarray; Richard Spencer scaled back his efforts to speak on university campuses; the Traditionalist Workers’ Party collapsed. A few months after “Unite the Right,” some anti-fascists felt confident enough to declare a provisional victory. However, a year later, fascists are reorganizing and trying new things.

Discouraged from pre-announced mass actions like Unite the Right, the explicitly Nazi organization Patriot Front has demonstrated a new pattern of surprise attacks via their appearances at the Houston Anarchist Book Fair and the San Antonio Occupy ICE camp. Thus far, these appear to be chiefly aimed at producing video footage with which to make advertisements for fascism, but the model could be used for much more destructive means.

Meanwhile, Joey Gibson of Patriot Prayer has figured out that if fascists can just hold off on publicly murdering people and deny having ties to overt white supremacists—however dishonestly—they can resume slowly building momentum while letting the police do most of their dirty work. He’s working with a volatile sector of the population—Proud Boys in Pinochet shirts—but he seems to be making his approach succeed where other fascist organizers have failed. We will surely see more groups like his attempting to rebrand fascist politics under the umbrella of patriotism, Christianity (or atheism), and other anodyne façades.

In response to the Patriot Front strategy, we need to improve our security precautions at public events—while being careful not to create additional obstacles to expanding our movements. Our greatest security will come from others caring about us and joining in our struggles, not from technical measures.

In response to the Patriot Prayer strategy, we have to refine our rhetoric and research in order to convey to the general public the threat that fascists pose even when they conceal their agenda behind a smokescreen. The growth of the European far right has shown how much more dangerous suit-and-tie fascists are than old-fashioned Nazi skinheads. Unite the Right turned out badly for fascists because they had not yet succeeded in teaching their rank and file to act “respectable,” but we shouldn’t count on fighting swastika-waving goons forever. One of the chief strategies by which fascists aim to recruit for their movements is to spread fear about an imagined “Antifa” that targets conservatives indiscriminately. We have to make it impossible for them to confuse the issue.

Anarchists chasing Joey Gibson of “Patriot Prayer” out of a park in which he hoped to hold a fascist rally in the wake of the tragedy in Charlottesville.

The Police

The wave of fascist and anti-fascist mobilizations that accompanied Trump’s rise to power caught many police agencies off guard. Police watched from the sidelines as Nazis battled anti-fascists in Sacramento in 2016; they lost control completely when demonstrators shut down Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley on February 1, 2017. They took a hands-off approach to the series of clashes that followed in Berkeley and elsewhere.

During the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the police largely stood back and let the confrontations play out. They only interceded to declare an unlawful assembly and clear the park when anti-fascists forced their hand, after the city and state authorities had announced a State of Emergency. This is consistent with a pattern that goes back at least a century. When white supremacists have the upper hand, police tend to give them free rein; when anti-fascists gain the advantage, police step in aggressively.

After Unite the Right, Charlottesville police faced a great deal of criticism for their hands-off handling of the demonstration. The response of police departments around the United States has been to shift to a more aggressive strategy involving massive multi-agency mobilizations and preemptive crackdowns. Police are doubling down on protecting and defending fascists under the guise of “preventing another Charlottesville” while employing overwhelming force against anti-fascist protestors.

Participants in a small anti-fascist rally in Newnan, Georgia reported this in April. On June 30 and again on August 4, police in Portland worked closely with the fascists, deploying potentially lethal weaponry at random against everyone on the other side of their lines. (Afterwards, the Portland police claimed they would “temporarily suspend” use of one of the many potentially lethal weapons they had employed, while using the opportunity to bait demonstrators into providing further intelligence on themselves.)

The decision to announce a weekend-long, statewide State of Emergency in Virginia several days ahead of a rally in Charlottesville at which no fascist or far-right presence is even anticipated is also consistent with this pattern. Police are using the violence fascists have perpetrated as an excuse to clamp down on those they attacked, effectively fulfilling the fascist program. It is no secret that the majority of police officers personally identify with far-right or fascist values, but this is a matter of the structural function of an institution that already deports and imprisons millions of people of color.

In the wake of Black Lives Matter and similar movements, police have widely lost credibility. We’ve come a long way since the Occupy movement when liberal protesters across the US argued that police were “part of the 99%”! Now, like the Trump regime, police recognize they are unpopular, yet appear to have concluded that they have enough institutional power and support from their base to get away with almost anything. They don’t seem to be concerned about losing legitimacy in the public eye. Perhaps they are correct that, in a polarized society, they need not concern themselves with how everyone feels about them. But this callous attitude may create vulnerabilities for them down the line.

The way that police have taken advantage of post-Charlottesville criticism to escalate their violence in support of fascist organizing is a reminder that when we critique the institutions of the state, we have to produce a discourse that delegitimizes them completely, a discourse that cannot be appropriated for other ends. We should use this opportunity to draw connections between policing and the fascist agenda before their latest escalation becomes normalized as well.

The institutional face of fascism.

The Trump Administration

After “Unite the Right,” Donald Trump provoked outrage by arguing that there were “fine people on both sides” and later, when pressed, assigning blame to both sides as well. Nonetheless, we can ascribe the departures of Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka from his administration in part to the ensuing backlash.

Today, Donald Trump continues to appeal to racists via dog whistles—for example, gratuitously attacking well-known athletes of color such as LeBron James. He is counting on gerrymandering, the unconditional loyalty of his base, and the monopolization of force in the hands of US government institutions to maintain his hold on power regardless of how unpopular he becomes with everyone else.

So far, this strategy has basically worked. A version of the Muslim Ban is now in effect; Trump continues to stack the courts with highly conservative judges who will hold those positions for decades to come, intensifying the racism of the carceral justice industry and making legal challenges like the J20 court case even more difficult. It’s also worth noting that many white supremacists are radicalized in prison. It’s possible to understand the current revival of fascist street violence as a side effect of the expanding prison-industrial complex. This is yet another example of the state and extra-state authoritarianism reinforcing each other.

As the state becomes the chief force implementing the fascist agenda, we have to stay focused on countering the ways it is targeting people, even as fascists attempt to draw us into private turf wars. The more effective we are at mobilizing broad resistance to its operations, the more allies we will have when it comes to facing down fascists. For example, in supporting prisoner revolts such as the upcoming nationwide prison strike, we are helping prisoners who are organizing along class lines rather than racial lines.

The Centrists

It’s a mistake to understand the struggle between fascists and their opponents according to a binary framework. Those who like to see themselves as political “centrists” in fact comprise a third pole in these struggles.

The centrists are not at all enthusiastic about anti-fascists being powerful enough to deny fascists a platform. Two weeks after fascists gathered in Charlottesville, anti-fascists shut down a fascist rally in Berkeley, California. In response, Berkeley’s mayor, a liberal Democrat, called on the police to classify anti-fascists as a gang and mobilize against them accordingly.

More recently, centrist Democrats used the elections of August 7 as an opportunity to launch social media attacks on the Green Party and third party voting in general; they hope to use the specter of Trump to discipline those to their left into supporting “moderate” candidates. As they attempt to channel all disapproval of Trump into support for the party establishment, corporate media outlets, and the FBI, we will surely see them make moves to discredit direct action and radical politics.

This gives us a new perspective on Facebook’s decision to delete the Facebook page that the Shut It Down DC Coalition was using to promote their protest against the “Unite the Right 2” rally in Washington, DC. Facebook claimed that the page in question appeared to be connected with Russian bot activity, associating anti-fascist organizing with the number one bugaboo of centrist Democrats. Perhaps this is entirely coincidental.

Immediately afterwards, Google, Facebook and Apple banned Alex Jones and his conspiracy-theory-peddling media company, Infowars. Infowars has long provided a venue for confused conservatives to find their way into far-right and fascist activity; we can hardly lament their misfortunes. But if the banning was a partisan centrist maneuver against “extremes,” we’ll be next on the chopping block.

And Us?

And us? What lessons did we learn from Charlottesville? How should our strategies shift in view of how others have changed theirs?

Forging Broader Ties

In the wake of the violent clashes in downtown Charlottesville, many anti-fascists concluded that it was essential to organize as broadly as possible.

But how do we set about doing this? For two weeks after the Unite the Right rally, the corporate media appeared sympathetic to the anti-fascist cause. This changed as soon as anti-fascists achieved victories in Boston, Durham, and Berkeley and conservative editors regained control of the discourse. We can’t count on corporate media outlets to tell our story for us. We have to do our best to shape the narratives they produce, since those are the terrain in which the police prepare justifications for their attacks, but the more we legitimize them as credible sources of information, the more powerful they will be when they turn against us.

We have to build a social base directly by organizing with others who are affected by the same problems. Anti-fascists in the Bay Area, Portland, and elsewhere have repeatedly accomplished this, turning out massive numbers of people who are willing to organize with respect for a diversity of tactics. This is essential: so long as you don’t give up your autonomy for it, gaining the ability to act together with large numbers of people is a more important victory than shutting down any particular fascist event. We should evaluate our anti-fascist organizing according to how well it equips us to engage in all the other struggles that confront us.

The most important aspect of collective self-defense—whether in Chiapas, Rojava, or the Virginia—is being firmly tied into a social base of support. All the firearms and concussion grenades in the world will not suffice to protect people who have lost the respect of their communities.

The struggle that is taking place here is not (just) a military clash between armed groups; it is a clash of values within an entire society. We have to spread our tactics, our values, and our unruliness far beyond the immediate sectors of the population that we are currently able to organize. Even when we are forced to engage in open confrontation, we have to remember that what we are doing must serve as a form of education and outreach. When fascists have been most effective, it has been because the real target of their actions was not simply to cause harm to undocumented people, anti-fascists, or other adversaries, but rather to win recruits. We have to fight in a way that makes our opposition to all forms of authoritarianism comprehensible and appealing to everyone who could join us.

Our relationship to those who will never join us is more complicated. History has shown a thousand times over that liberal politicians will turn to us in an emergency—for example, to create a political crisis they can offer to solve—but will disavow and abandon us the instant it becomes politically expedient. At the same time, as society polarizes, grassroots support from leftists is unlikely to discourage police from hospitalizing or even killing us. If we build powerful enough movements, perhaps we will gain enough leverage on liberal centrists that they will be forced to stand up for us without thus securing the means to pacify us. But that goal is a long way off.

The bottom line is that we have to address the root causes of suffering. If we do that, people will join our efforts for their own reasons. This brings us back to the importance of keeping our focus on the state, rather than individual fascists.

Doxxing

In the wake of the clashes in Charlottesville, both sides have stepped up their efforts to identify their adversaries. This is an asymmetrical conflict. Fascists who are doxxed have more to fear from society at large: Joey Gibson and countless others have lost their jobs as a result of anti-fascists publicizing their politics. Even the US military has kicked out fascists, if only after tremendous public pressure. In addition, fascists have been disowned by their parents, kicked out of school, and faced other forms of social exclusion. In some parts of the US, doxxing has reduced the fascist movement to those who are extremely privileged or disenfranchised. We should continue to use this strategy, building and circulating databases of everyone involved in far-right activity.

Those who are doxxed by fascists and the far right face a different set of risks. The police have charged people with felonies on the basis of research and speculation originating on far-right and fascist online forums. In addition, anti-fascists have also received threats at their workplaces and homes. The stress of being identified as a target for fascist violence can be considerable, in view of how many fascists are unstable to the point of being suicidal and homicidal. In addition, if the government were to make another qualitative shift to the right, the police could utilize lists of targets supplied by fascists. In the meantime, doxxing discourages high-risk activity on the part of those whose identities are known to fascists and police officers.

This is perhaps its chief structural function—to take advantage of the asymmetrical way that the police target anti-fascists over fascists in order to tie the hands of anti-fascists in conflicts. Republican politicians who understand this introduced the “Unmasking Antifa” law.

In this context, it’s more important than ever for anti-fascists to engage in pre-emptive harm reduction. See below for a collection of guides to minimizing the threat posed by doxxing.

The black bloc in Portland on August 4, 2018.

Masking

One of the solutions to the threat of doxxing is to conceal one’s identity. There are pros and cons to this: the more effectively anti-fascists mask up, the greater the risk that they will appear alienating to those who are not familiar with the dangers of engaging in anti-fascist struggle, and the more aggressively police will target them.

One solution to this problem is to normalize masking as a regular part of political activity. In the year since Charlottesville, it has become increasingly common for a wide range of demonstrators to utilize masks and protective gear. In Portland on August 4, the number of people who marched in or behind the black bloc was inspiring. At least in certain hotbeds of resistance, it should be possible to legitimize wearing masks, especially in view of the threat of doxxing.

“In Charlottesville, anti-fascists largely opted to forego masks and black clothing, despite the risks of participating in confrontations while permitting fascists and police to identify them. Due to far-right and corporate media efforts to stigmatize ‘antifa’ as violent and alien, participants feared that concealing their identities would only help to legitimize the fascists. This concern underscores the extent to which anarchists were operating from a position of weakness in Charlottesville.”

Over the year since, the fact that activists did not conceal their identities in Charlottesville has caused no end of grief to those on the receiving end of fascist doxxing. But it may have been the right choice, all the same.

In situations where it is not possible or strategic to show up in black bloc gear, demonstrators can utilize a wide array of other items to the same effect: hats, umbrellas, sunglasses, reversible jackets, wigs, scarves, and the like. On a full day of actions, it’s best to bring a wide assortment of these and continue changing them throughout the course of events. Likewise, in any potential altercation, those who have their hands free should look around for cameras and other perimeter threats and attend to them.

Staying Flexible, Staying Rooted

Those who fight monsters should take care not to become monsters themselves, Friedrich Nietzsche warns us, and this is especially true when it comes to opposing fascists. Our conditions for victory are different from theirs. They want to exclude; we want to include. They want to dominate; we want to coexist. They want to attack, to exterminate; we want to protect, to nourish, to create. We have to be careful not to militarize ourselves, not to get stuck in routines and rituals, not to lose our optimism about humanity or our ability to love.

When our efforts to prevent fascists from organizing hit an impasse—for example, in Portland, where the full might of the police state has been utilized to defend Patriot Prayer marches—we have to identify other ways to achieve our objectives. When all the resources of the state are engaged in protecting a single fascist demonstration, anti-fascists could pick another target via which to express their values and shift the focus of attention. We have to stay flexible and continue to experiment with new tactics and ideas.

Likewise, the tragedy in Charlottesville and all the other fascist violence before and since has showed that we have to take trauma and healing seriously. Making care a fundamental part of our organizing, we can incorporate collective grieving and healing into the rest of our activities in order to be good to ourselves, strengthen bonds, and dream together about the future.

The greatest harm that fascists could do to us would be to reshape our conception of human nature in their own image, so that we think of their pettiness and hatred in place of the tremendous potential of humanity. We should understand the relationships we forge in the process of fighting fascism as a model for the alternative to fascism that we are proposing—and treat each other accordingly. If we can create nourishing, egalitarian, and inspiring communities despite all the forces ranged against us, these will show that we have a better way.

A solidarity action in Berlin following the tragedy in Charlottesville.

On August 4, thousands of people came together in Portland, Oregon to protest a rally organized by the fascist groups “Patriot Prayer” and the “Proud Boys.” This followed a similar march on June 30, at which the police opened their ranks in order to permit the fascists to attack protesters, then protected the assailants and attacked the same protesters that the fascists had just attacked. August 4 followed a similar script. Once again, police worked closely with the fascists, but this time they were the ones to escalate the conflict, deploying nearly lethal force against those who had come to demonstrate against them. Examining the events of August 4, we can see that the fascists themselves are not the greatest threat we face. Police are already acting as the stormtroopers of fascism in the United States.

Here follows our analysis of the events of August 4, followed by an eyewitness account. Please donate to the bail fund to support those arrested on August 4.

Throughout 2017, as anarchists and other opponents of fascism scrambled to respond to a newly ascendant fascist movement, police, too, were refining their strategies. In Charlottesville, when fascists attacked outnumbered counter-demonstrators, the police stood back and let the clashes take place, only interceding afterwards. However, the violence that resulted from this strategy catalyzed a nationwide backlash. Two weeks later, when Joey Gibson and his “Patriot Prayer” group attempted to hold rallies in San Francisco and Berkeley, 10,000 anti-fascists chased out the police and their fascist friends.

The forces of order set out to craft a new approach. In April 2018, participants in a small anti-fascist rally in Newnan, Georgia reported that the police had changed strategies, indiscriminately targeting them with overwhelming force and lethal weaponry from the very beginning of the demonstration. “The next round will not pit us against rag-tag Nazis, but against the full force of the state itself,” they warned others around the country. “Street-level fascists are dangerous, but the escalation of state control and police violence fulfills their program on a much larger scale.”

Collusion between police and fascists is nothing new. The Ku Klux Klan openly coordinated with police in many parts of the United States throughout much of the 19th and 20th centuries. However, when the relationship between police and openly fascist groups is not recognized, this enables the authorities to present themselves as a supposedly neutral solution to the problem of “extremism,” justifying an intensification of surveillance and control that are then used to implement increasingly totalitarian measures.

Conventional wisdom has it that the role of fascists is to do the dirty work of the state, carrying out attacks that the police cannot, like last month’s Nazi assault on the Occupy ICE encampment in San Antonio. Yet on August 4 in Portland, it was the police who did the dirty work for the fascists. They were the ones who perpetrated the violence that the fascists had been promising to enact. They allowed participants in the fascist rally to gather outside the area for which they had obtained a permit, rather than within it, so as to avoid being searched. Then, permitting the fascists to retain the majority of their weapons, they accompanied them around downtown like a bodyguard, facing outward away from the fascists to protect them from the entire city of Portland. Finally, the police attacked the crowd, initiating hostilities by shooting concussion grenades at people’s heads.

A police officer fired this concussion grenade at an anti-fascist demonstrator’s head, inflicting a grievous head wound. If the demonstrator had not been wearing a helmet, the grenade surely would have killed him.

Police officers grinning as they employ potentially lethal force against those in the path of the fascist march.

The following day, a similar scenario played out in Berkeley at another demonstration called by the same network of fascists. Few fascists showed up, yet intense conflicts unfolded between anti-fascists and police.

How do we respond to escalating totalitarianism when every attempt to stand up to those recruiting for racist murders brings us immediately into conflict with the full force of the police state?

First, we have to connect the struggle against fascism with the struggles against police that have taken place over the past several years. We have to join forces with everyone on the receiving end of police violence—communities of color, poor people, undocumented people, and everyone else who already recognizes the struggle against police violence as a matter of life and death.

Second, we have to use the increasingly overt collaboration between fascists and police to delegitimize the police in the eyes of those who still regard them as the preservers of safety and justice. As we have explored elsewhere, fascist overreach can cause more people to recognize the oppressive function of the “enforcers of order.”

Finally, we have to draw the connections between grassroots fascists and the systematic violence of the state. If the fascist agenda comes to fruition, it will be carried out through the institutions of the state. Those who wish to oppose slavery and genocide should make sure that the state has neither the legitimacy to get away with them nor the resources to carry them out. This is one of the many ways in which an anarchist opposition to state power itself is essential to the struggle against fascism. We need to help other people make these connections, and quick.

Note: Throughout this text, we refer to “Patriot Prayer” and the “Proud Boys” as fascists on account of their numerouswell-documentedaffiliations with explicitly fascist groups and their explicit advocacy of patriarchal authoritarianism and bigotry. Some of them disingenuously seek to cloud the issue, but it is enough for us that they advocate for the mass murders Pinochet carried out and regularly give Nazi salutes at these demonstrations.

Participants in the “Proud Boys” and “Patriot Prayer” explicitly endorse mass killings of those who disagree with them. In Chile, those killings were not carried out by grassroots fascists, but by the police and military—just as they will be in the US unless we mobilize on a massive scale.

Anti-fascist demonstrators in Portland: a proportionate response.

All Out Portland: August 4, 2018 Report

People trickled into Chapman square. The PopMob demonstration was packed onto the sidewalk and steps across the street at the courthouse along with the more liberal contingent of public support for the counter-protest. People carried signs, speakers addressed the crowd over bullhorns, and clowns danced on an adjacent sidewalk while people in black bloc milled about. After some scouting, the best route down to the waterfront was determined and the bloc crowded in behind a banner reading “GTFÖ ya Jabrönis,” to lead the march. PopMob fell in behind us. We arrived at the intersection of Salmon and Naito Parkway some time after 11:30.

After about an hour of standing in direct sunlight, packed in behind the banner, dripping sweat, occasionally forming a tight circle so someone could change or pee, we got word that Joey Gibson and his goons were marching north on the waterfront. The police had been threatening us since we got
there, telling us to get out of the street or we would be subject to arrest and less-lethal impact weapons.

We turned north and began marching up the opposite sidewalk across the street from the fascists. Armored vehicles with pigs in full riot gear drove up and down Naito Parkway between the two groups. Pigs on foot were also forced to walk up and down the street in the hot sun in full riot gear; their visible discomfort made the heat that we were suffering more bearable. At some point, my smaller affinity group got separated from the rest of our bloc. We stayed moving with the larger group, approximately one third of which was also clad in some kind of bloc gear, as we moved up and down the sidewalk, still unable to enter the street. Bystanders handed us cold water bottles and granola bars, and we encountered Food Not Bombs handing out falafel wraps. A vast and diverse group of people had turned out.

In addition to the bloc, labor was there in force, along with the Democratic Socialists of America and the various other groups that composed PopMob, including some folks dressed up as giant sunflowers. At one point, someone rolled up a shopping cart with a guillotine in it, to the tune of The Coup’s “The Guillotine.”

The march slowed to a stop. Our crew was reveling in having found some shade to stop and drink water in; we were dancing to the music playing from a source none of us could see. The reprieve was brief. Suddenly, to the south there was a flurry of movement and a call for assistance. We moved in, to see that Joey Gibson and two members of his goon squad had been allowed to cross the street into the counterprotest. We locked arms, and everyone present, bloc and not, formed a tight circle around them, and pushed them back into the street. I didn’t see what transpired before that moment, but as they
crossed back over to their side, they exchanged high fives. Just then, I heard someone yell, “I got Joey’s hat! Anyone wanna take a selfie in it?”

There was another brief scuffle with a guy trying to take pictures in the wrong place at the wrong time, then the tension seemed to dissipate a bit. After what felt like ages but probably wasn’t more than 20
minutes, the fascists started walking south again from Salmon Street. The counterprotest followed from across the street, then turned right down Main Street and descended deeper into southwest. There was a scattering, then a regrouping of people as folks scrambled to reassemble behind banners—I think this was at Columbia and Naito Parkway. Riot cops now faced off with the counterprotestors, with the fascists cowering across the street behind them, cheering on the taxpayer-funded stormtroopers. A U-Haul truck was driving around full of counterprotesters with a PA system in the back and a banner
reading “racists can’t dance,” playing music for people to dance to.

We were far enough back that we didn’t have our eyes on the pigs when they opened fire, so the first few concussive rounds were a terrifying, confusing surprise. Everyone was suddenly moving backwards. I tried to keep my eyes or hands on my friends and walk slowly backwards, as did most of the people around me, in spite of the number of people who, understandably, turned and ran. The pigs continued to fire concussive rounds, pepper balls, marker rounds, and possibly rubber bullets. I also saw several people covered in mace getting their eyes flushed by medics or other comrades. I saw a few people bleeding from what I assumed were wounds from rubber bullets or from gravel sprayed by concussive rounds hitting the asphalt and exploding.

The pigs continued deploying less-lethal rounds, pushing the counterprotest first west, then north. After a long game of cat and mouse, the counterprotest was so scattered that our crew decided it was time to go. Our numbers were diminishing, we were vulnerable to being kettled, and I was nervous that we would get trapped between fascists and pigs if we continued going in the direction that the police were trying to force us.

Later, I learned that there were still fascists hanging around at the waterfront, despite their shuttles having left. From accounts I heard, there were about 30 people on either side of Naito Parkway, with riot cops between them, yelling at each other for an hour or so before getting bored and leaving.

The next day, I’m not the only one demoralized. A few fascists jumped the barricades and left bloody, but in the end the pigs protected them, and did so effectively. We never had an opportunity to get close to them; they had their march.

On the other hand, the turnout was tremendous. The amalgam of different groups and individual actors created a mass of people that outnumbered them at least 3 to 1. I have no doubt that Saturday’s events will inform tactical decisions in the future. As we collectively gain experience fighting present-day fascism in our contemporary context, we will continue to adjust accordingly. Also, the disproportionate police response infuriated a lot of people.

Finally, I would be remiss to not talk about the use of concussive rounds by riot cops. Afterwards, there were several accounts of police aiming at people’s heads with flash-bang grenades. One individual was struck in the back of the head at close range so that the round remained stuck in his helmet, inflicting a gaping head wound. This attack would have been fatal if not for the bicycle helmet.

The implications of this are serious. We know cops are violent, murderous thugs, and this demonstration environment gives them an excuse to indulge in hurting people under the pretense of “crowd control” with even less accountability than normal. Perhaps motorcycle helmets should be considered essential from now on.

August is shaping up to be a busy month in the United States, with a convergence of struggles against fascist organizing, the prison-industrial complex, and the violence of the border as exemplified by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). With our comrades at Submedia and It’s Going Down, we’ve prepared a short video addressing the situation. Below, we follow it with a few remarks about the situation.

All out this August!

Shut Down Fascism

We’re seeing a new wave of activity from the fascist movement that was so soundly beaten in the streets a year ago. On July 28, the Nazis of Patriot Front carried out a cowardly surprise attack on Occupy ICE in San Antonio. This August, the same fascist groups that terrorized and murdered people last year are preparing to rally around the US again—everywhere from Providence and Washington, DC to Portland and Berkeley.

Fascists are the street wing of the Trump agenda. We have to shut them down wherever they organize. But above all, we can’t let them stop us from standing up to the state, the chief source of authoritarian violence.

“These goons are of great use to the authorities. They can carry out attacks that the state is not yet able to, intimidating those who might otherwise rebel. They distract from the institutionalized violence of the state, which is still the cause of most of the oppression that takes place in our society. Above all, they enable the authorities to portray themselves as neutral keepers of the peace.”

And Keep the Pressure on ICE

For years, people concerned about the violence of the border sought a point of intervention to take action against it. At the beginning of the Trump era, we proposed that people build on the example of the airport blockades by shutting down ICE offices. This summer, the Occupy ICE model finally took off, with occupations all around the United States.

The movement has managed to accomplish a lot with a relatively small amount of people. Unlike astroturf movements like the March for Our Lives that rapidly became promotional events for the Democratic Party, Occupy ICE has offered agency to the exploited and excluded and achieved a direct impact. This has included direct aid and solidarity for the struggles of immigrants, halting specific deportations, and delaying deportations on a larger scale. Occupy ICE has blocked the Trump administration’s policy of breaking up families and forced Trump to try to distance himself from his own policy.

In short, direct action gets the goods: we don’t need political parties to make change, we can take action ourselves to force the state to stop what it is doing.

Unlike the top-down decision involving the FBI and DHS to clear the Occupy encampments in coordinated attacks, the Trump administration has thus far permitted cities to handle the encampments on their own, presumably for fear that centralized repression would backfire. In response, fascists and others on the far right have taken on the task attacking the encampments themselves, following in the footsteps of DHS agents. The fascists aspire to act as an auxiliary force of repression to do what the forces of the state cannot currently do.

However, this strategy can backfire for reactionaries who hold state power. The failure of the “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville a year ago cost the Trump regime dearly. Likewise, the decision to rely on evidence provided by far-right surveillance vigilantes Project Veritas cost prosecutor Jennifer Kerkhoff the entire J20 case. When fascists and other grassroots reactionaries overextend themselves, their failures can undermine the legitimacy of the reigning party they hope to support. We have to see fascist attacks as an opportunity to seize the initiative in our struggle against the state.

Above all, fascists would like us to narrow the scope of our efforts to countering their organizing; they aim to trap us in a private grudge match while the state continues to mass-incarcerate and deport people. We beat them by organizing movements that can take on the chief source of oppression, the state itself.

The organizers of a looming nationwide prison strike have expressed solidarity with Occupy ICE, linking the fight against prison slavery to the call to abolish ICE. This has come in the form of statements from prison strike leaders in support of Occupy ICE and also recent hunger strikes in solidarity with hunger-striking migrant detainees. When prisoners unite across racial lines against prison slavery, it’s up to us to do the same on the outside.

So in solidarity with #AllOutAugust, we encourage people to continue to organize blockades against ICE facilities; to continue to defend Occupy ICE camps and reenergize them with events, music, films, and discussions; and to mobilize solidarity around the prison strike, as well. It is easy to draw links between resistance to prison slavery and the fight to abolish ICE and the borders it violently enforces. Continuing to support the Occupy ICE camps and anti-ICE blockades is one of many ways to act in solidarity with the prison strike.

Entering into open conflict with fascists is often terrifying. Yet we hope that the movement for a world without oppression can come out of the trying events of August stronger—and that as the summer comes to a close, the struggles against borders, fascists, and police violence will converge in new ways and gain new momentum.

We’ve received the following report from participants in the occupation around the Portland facilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While our collective has no official position on issues internal to the occupation, we consider it important to promote constructive conversations about power dynamics within our movements and the ways that they can impose limits on what we can accomplish together. For more material on this subject, consult our earlier report, “The ICE Age Is Over: Reflections from the ICE Blockades.” Shortly, for the sake of amplifying multiple perspectives, we will add one more text from Portland.

“Criticize the comrade, take a criticism from the comrade.” -Bambu

“We do NOT touch the police tape. We do NOT block the street,” a “leader” of the Portland occupation screamed through a megaphone at a crowd of newly arrived demonstrators near the reopened ICE facility. Organic anger from a group of mostly liberals led to a brief confrontation with Federal Protective Services (FPS/DHS), which was quickly quashed by an internal security team. People were ushered onto the sidewalk and scolded for not following supposedly “collective” agreements. The building remained untouched as protesters who were eager to agitate were made to feel guilty and illegitimate.

In the last three weeks of Portland’s occupation at the ICE building, we’ve found ourselves caught between a desire to build with folks and a need to critique the ways that violence is sustained by our work. We’ve failed to address interpersonal violence and have left people isolated from the movement. We’ve prioritized the security of our “leaders” because of their contributions and their assumed necessity to our commune rather than making space for conversation about sexual violence and the strategies we must implement to make sure folks are held accountable rather than simply “vouched for.” And we’ve lost sight of the initial goal of abolishing ICE.

Our occupation is said to be leading the movement against deportations across the country. We’re currently cohabitating with the ICE facility; as their work continues, we continue to sit back with our La Croix in hand and practice “self-care.” In many ways, this commune has been helpless since its inception, demonstrating the need to build conversation and criticism into our work.

When it comes down to it, the vast majority of us here have no idea how to coexist in a commune; we are improvising. We offer up this criticism knowing that it’s much easier to critique than to build. We write this in hopes of making space for continual analysis, collective reflection, and commitment to future organizing.

More than anything, we must practice humility and be conscious of our role in this organizing work. Shutting down an ICE building for over two weeks is a huge feat, and we do not want to diminish this accomplishment. But we cannot forget the people who our commune is said to be built on behalf of: undocumented folks, and specifically undocumented children, who are suffering in detention centers around the country. We remind ourselves first and foremost that these people do not need our saving. Amazing organizing efforts have been led by undocumented folks in and out of detention centers, often largely by undocumented women. They’ll be doing that whether or not we sleep out here tonight. Still, solidarity efforts are crucial to dismantling these walls and to abolishing ICE.

The commune is exciting because it’s an opportunity to experiment with different organizing strategies and visions for another world. We have an amazing kitchen staff, an incredible kids area, and overall an impressive space. But we also have a pseudo-policing unit, extremely flawed approaches to navigating accusations of sexual violence, and potential security threats. At this point, preserving the commune has become a more central project than actually disrupting ICE. We’ve failed to build a space to assess and change our strategies as they inevitably fail or are co-opted. Consequently, our commune has done little to interrogate the ways it reproduces and legitimizes policing, surveillance, and heteropatriarchal violence.

Ultimately, much of our work has been whitewashed, neutralized, and made non-threatening to the state—that’s how we’ve been able to be legitimized as an action that will not be touched by the Portland Police Bureau (PPB). We supposedly decided that the commune will now only engage in “passive resistance,” a concept as oxymoronic as “good policing” or “public property.” The commune’s internal police force, known as the “Care Team,” has worked to ensure that protesters “keep in line.” Our commitment to the commune’s continued existence has become a commitment to establishing a framework in which insurgent and revolutionary politics become unimaginable.

“All Cops” Means the Pretend Ones Too

Seizing the lack of structure as an opportunity for a power grab, a group of people created a self-appointed security team within the first few days. Sporting pink bandannas as an emblem of this new committee, the group established a visible manifestation of their higher status.

From the beginning, the team consisted primarily of individuals with a pattern of taking control and policing others at past demonstrations. Masquerading as anarchists and radicals, these people implement authoritarian practices and recreate the state structures we have set out to abolish. The ideology of many of those on the security team is indecipherable; sometimes it appears that their primary motive is power.

The security phenomenon is a recurring issue in Portland. At almost every rally or march, one finds the same dozen people role-playing as cops, following around “suspicious” people. They hold themselves above the participants, who they are there to “protect.” The people who assume this role never appear on the front lines fighting riot police; they can’t be found when there is a real security threat. They pounce on the lone agitator, getting enough action to bolster their ego
and flex their power. The anarchist symbols covering the camp are purely aesthetic, since we
continue to let security govern us.

The security team created a monopoly on information, keeping important reports about threats to themselves. Using this lack of transparency to their advantage, security members were able to justify their existence through distorted threats and the instilling of fear—a tactic habitually used by the state. Calling a “code red” one night, security commanded people to retreat into tents while refusing to offer information as to what the situation was. Terrified newcomers and children scrambled back with no grasp on how severe the threat actually was.

Their authority allows them to determine the political legitimacy of people’s thoughts and actions, as well as deciding which actions are “too risky” for the commune to engage in. We’ve seen women enter the space with questions about the work, only to be told, “Do you really want to know or are you just being facetious?” We’ve seen folks heckling Homeland Security Officers told that they’re “kids” and therefore should get back in line and listen to the commune authority. We’ve seen comrades lambasted and told to leave for attempting civil disobedience.

All of this is done under the guise of “protecting” people of color and trans folks. We are open to discussing tactics, but we will not stand for a security team that grounds its work in the patriarchal protection of black, brown, and trans people and that insists on policing all forms of political action, analysis, and engagement.

The members of the security team are able to absolve themselves of responsibility for their policing efforts by leaning on “consensus-based decisions.” In confronting someone who is “out of line,” they argue that they’re simply carrying out orders. Whose orders these are is entirely unclear. Consensus by itself can be employed as a tactic for repressing autonomous action. But the commune takes it one step further by neglecting to actually engage in true consensus decision-making. The general assemblies here occur sporadically and happen at inaccessible times. The result is that an invisible, unknown, exclusive committee of people reach a decision which is then stamped as group consensus and forced on everyone else. There is a hidden rigid hierarchy disguised in careful leftist language to isolate critics. Blatantly false statements are thrown around, such as “EVERYONE living at camp agrees that…” or “the overwhelming CONSENSUS is…” This destroys any space for critique and gives those new to the camp the impression that everyone is in unanimous agreement.

We understand the need to disrupt the “ally industrial complex” in which white people, those new to the movement, and other “privileged” folks sit on the side and cheer on our POC comrades. At this point, more and more people want to get involved, and that’s crucial. People who show up must be understood as potential comrades and legitimate political actors. The liberal who decides to scream at the cops is engaging in an activity that might further radicalize them—and yet we choose to police that work, tell them it’s out of line, and demand that the ways we disrupt ICE be narrow and pre-approved. How do we expect to expand this movement if we teach our potential comrades that their political analysis is irrelevant? Why should they return to this work if they are told that their ideas, opinions, and forms of action are incorrect? If our goal is to build a new world, we have to start by not replicating the old. Ultimately, we’re isolating potential comrades and disciplining our collective political imagination.

Security Team 2.0: Your Misogyny is Showing

After initial criticism of the internal police force, the security team rebranded themselves as “the Care Team.” This attempt to rebrand leans on understandings of the importance of care—the feminized labor that sustains the social and emotional well-being of the commune. When we think of care, we think of our kitchen staff, the folks who hold down the childcare tent, and those partaking in other forms of feminized work. Excluding those folks from “the” Care Team is not only a tactic the internal police uses to to avoid accountability, but is also a disrespectful manipulation of feminist understandings of care.

We hear more and more in leftist circles about the need to build a new world based on a politics of care. We understand care as feminized work of listening, working to understand people’s emotional needs, and validating and supporting all who enter our spaces. It’s a call to collectivize our traumas and strategies for healing, which should not be conflated with neoliberal notions of “self-care.” We see much of the work of care tied to Black Feminist analysis, the work of the Movement for Black Lives, and in prison abolitionist circles. We want to expand that work in order to build a movement for each other.

Contrary to many beliefs, “care” is not about a practice of patriarchal protection, nor a politics based on policing potential threats. The current campaign of Critical Resistance, “Care Not Cops,” does the necessary work of disrupting notions of “good policing,” making it clear that policing and care are incompatible. Care is an acknowledgement of our vulnerability to others and a recognition of the need to collaborate for our collective survival.

Within minutes of entering the commune we learn that one of the core organizers is a person with serious accusations against them. Of course, it’s not our job to snoop around and try to determine whether or not this specific person is “guilty,” nor necessarily to call for their immediate removal. But we do want to know whether there is a process by which accusations are heard, people’s experiences are validated, and action is taken to hold people accountable and to ensure that those making these accusations feel welcomed in. We want to see a commitment to addressing and disrupting gendered violence and other forms of harm. And we want to know that these conversations are at the forefront of the community we seek to build.

When men are in charge, apparently, this becomes too much to ask for. When we ask why someone is still on the core “Care Team,” we are told that despite accusations, this person has been “vouched for.” His leadership position and the amount he’s contributed become grounds for delegitimizing and failing to address accusations. We hear excuses about organizational capacity used to put accusations of sexual violence on the back burner until we can give them the attention they need.

Our shared critiques of criminal justice procedures and commitments to abolishing the prison industrial complex are being used to justify not addressing the sexual violence accusations against people. The counterargument that people of color are more likely to face incarceration is not wrong; however, to use this as a justification not to hold people accountable is disappointing. To manipulate these realities in order to avoid even having conversations about feminist praxis only further embeds our work in the same patriarchal structures that we claim to oppose.

The work of transformative justice is tricky and we’ve seen few attempts at it done well. But that should not cause us to conclude it is not necessary in our work. If we learned anything from zines like Why Misogynists Make Great Informants, essays like Betrayal: A Critical Analysis of Rape Culture in Anarchist Subcultures, and the book The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities, it is that this sort of misogyny in our circles is nothing new. We know that these forms of violence and harm take place within our communities. We build with our shared commitment to holding ourselves and each other accountable.

What’s the Point: Passive Resistance and Smashing the State

If you’ve spent any time at the camp, you are probably familiar with the obsession with “passive resistance.” It’s hard to miss. The phrase is posted on the entrance to the camp, mindlessly thrown around by “leaders,” and praised by the liberals who come and go. As much as it is used, nobody seems to know what it means or how we came to embrace it. This section will not be focused on the failures of nonviolence. That story has been written countless times and we’ve all sat through arguments over it. Instead, we focus on how self-appointed leaders twist the idea to shut down virtually any resistance to ICE.

Passive resistance is not about passivity, it is about resistance. It is peaceful, but it is not compliance. At the camp, the term is being pulled further and further from its definition. When a few daring comrades tried to lock arms on the side entrance, blocking in the federal agents, they were attacked for not practicing proper resistance. Other people tried linking themselves together in the driveway, but were criticized by leaders for poking the bear. Even yelling at police is a bit too provocative. Passive resistance has lost its meaning and value, and it seems that the leaders don’t care about resisting, just about passivity.

The assumption at the camp seems to be that by engaging in their version of passive resistance, we will swing the media coverage and stall a police attack. It sounds great in theory, but it appears to ignore history altogether. Those who embrace this framework are operating under the illusion that if we are peaceful and compliant with police orders, we can exist in harmony with the state. This ignores every peaceful protest that has been ambushed by riot police, every “passive” mobilization that has been squashed by the state, every instance of police brutality. It buys into the notion that our behavior dictates how the police will treat us, the same idea recited by Fox News pundits after police murders. In reality, the state cares little about how we behave. The authorities make their own excuses with the assistance of the media and attack on their own initiative. The goal of abolishing ICE and the practice of physically shutting it down puts us in conflict with the state. Since the camp is diametrically opposed to the state and its wishes, a police attack is inevitable. Peacefulness and compliance will not seduce the state into inaction, it will just take away our power. In conceding our power, we let our safety lie in the hands of the police.

On June 28, while most of the camp slept, federal police cleared the entrances and arrested multiple people. Our barricades were ripped down, and the veteran camp in the driveway was torn to pieces—despite their peacefulness. The police proved that they didn’t need an excuse to move on the camp. Yet leaders are still calling for “passive resistance” and employing vulnerability politics to suppress militancy.

The Care Team frequently falls back on the claim that any escalation would “put __ group at risk,” using the most convenient marginalized identity at hand to make this argument. The “risk” that they claim to be defending people from is the potential for arrests or police brutality directed towards people of color and trans people. This analysis is not incorrect; less privileged people will be further targeted by police, face harsher sentences, and gain less sympathy from white civil society. However, the weaponizing of identity in order to police certain actions not only means speaking on behalf of a population “in need of protection,” it also attempts to make any discussion about risk, tactics, and actions impossible and to shut down political conversation.

If we believe that we can remove risk and danger from this work, then we ultimately must commit to reproducing the existing social order. There will be risk in disrupting ICE and danger in threatening white civil society. People should analyze the risks, the dangers they face personally, and determine whether or not they want to take an action or be in a specific space. We need to build in support so we do not reserve specific actions for more privileged people—but winning with “passive resistance” is a fantasy.

To assume that we must resist passively in order to accommodate more vulnerable commune members falsely ties militance to whiteness. We think of Jackie Wang’s essay, “Against Innocence: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Safety,” in which she takes on this question of risk. Wang writes,

“When an analysis of privilege is turned into a political program that asserts that the most vulnerable should not take risks, the only politically correct politics becomes a politics of reformism and retreat, a politics that necessarily capitulates to the status quo while erasing the legacy of Black Power groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army.”

We think about people who have been resisting in deportation centers since before ICE’s inception,about militant direct action taken by undocumented students across the country and the need for further militancy to dismantle patriarchy, white supremacy, and the settler-colonial state.

A feeling of complacency has spread throughout the camp as it has transitioned from a militant attempt to shut down ICE operations to a sort of Burning Man commune peacefully coexisting with DHS. With an assortment of sparkling water, open yoga sessions, and nightly concerts contrasted by armored snipers on the roof and makeshift barricades covered in circle-As, the camp has the look of a leftist music festival—Anarchoachella, if you will. Camaraderie is important and nothing is inherently wrong with creating a comfortable space. But our focus has been abandoned and our inclination towards action has dissipated.

When attempting to initiate an urgently-needed discussion on possible actions the night before ICE resumed work in the building, organizers were met with hostility for interrupting a music show and berated by a crowd of mostly newcomers about the necessity of “self-care” and “taking a break.” After a night of dancing and consuming kale salads, they put up no resistance as ICE agents poured into the building the next morning. While this is unintentional, we are capitalizing on the suffering of children and wasting resources to live out our collective ideological fantasies. If holding space is prioritized over disrupting deportations and separations, the commune is nothing more than a bourgeois liberal playground.

Stop Embarrassing the Movement

In our struggle to smash the borders and end the deadly policing of them, we have replicated the same institutions we oppose. Our camp is encircled in barriers separating ourselves from the capitalist hellworld and the flow of people is strictly controlled. Our own security cameras monitor the movements of occupiers and the entrances and exits are restricted to a few gates. We have created categories of those who belong and those who don’t. A list has been compiled of commune exiles that includes critics, utopians, and anti-authoritarians. ACAB adorns the wall but the “Care Team” is a border patrol of its own. Rampant anti-houseless rhetoric prompts exclusion of those perceived as houseless while simultaneously labeling ourselves a tent city. If nothing changes, our commune will collapse before the police even attempt to raid it.

The occupation has been remarkable in garnering support and sparking grand aspirations. The amount of effort and organization put into sustaining the commune is commendable. But right now, we are doing nothing to hinder deportations or support detainee organizing. Occupiers are living comfortably while ICE continues its reign of terror next door. With all its flaws, the commune has taught us and transformed us. Still, it’s time to abandon our notions of space and romanticized community and consider what it would mean to build a movement based on unconditional hospitality, real care, and actual militancy.

If it stays as it is, the commune will continue to drain resources and police insurrectionary potential while amounting to nothing more than a mild inconvenience to ICE employees. With the widespread popularity of increasingly radical abolitionist politics, we have the opportunity to bring people into our analysis and agitate against state control and hierarchy in general. We must back up our utopian visions by showing the revolutionary possibility of a world free of borders and authority. This is not a call to abandon the occupation altogether or to allow ICE to resume as normal. This is a reminder of the need for constant critique and a space to have these conversations. We ask our comrades to consider our goals and examine our tactics. Opportunities for meaningful action exist within the commune but only if we overhaul our current commitment to passivity and let go of our desire to be palatable to the state.

Furthermore, we call for a decentralized approach. ICE isn’t just a building, so don’t let your actions be limited to it. Seek out all of the appendages that keep the machine running and strike while we have the power. The information is out there. Find your comrades, form an affinity group, and get to work. Redecorate your local GEO Group building, throw a block party in front of an ICE agent’s house, and always hold yourself and your comrades accountable. ICE is starting to melt, but we’re just warming up.

We’ve received the following open letter from Chile expressing support for the occupations of ICE offices and detention centers around the United States. It offers a useful perspective from outside the boundaries of the US.

Charting Transit despite the State

We stand in solidarity with comrades across the world who are bravely barricading and occupying ICE detention centers in the so-called United States, in cities like Tacoma, Portland, Atlanta, San Francisco, and New York. The politicians in their offices shuffle papers while the liberals hold signs nicely asking the government to stop ripping families apart and traumatizing children. By contrast, these partisans understand that the gravity of the issue at hand—human life and dignity—is not a matter of politics.

For example, photos and videos from Atlanta spread across the world showed the #icebreakers blasting music while both the occupiers and those behind bars danced. Protesters taunted the police with donuts and repeatedly held their ground against police eviction. Rather than merely making visible that the voting public is unhappy with their elected officials’ decisions, they took direct action against the state bureaucracies and their functionaries to create moments of life and joy that cut across the divide between citizen and non-citizen.

These occupations are occurring while politicians are preparing for election campaigns; many will undoubtedly promise a more humane yet still “sensible” immigration policy in order to get votes. We wish to share one thing that is clear throughout the West: Electoral politics is not a path to survival. As long as the United States has existed, its borders have cleaved families apart. As long as states have existed, their bounded territories have served to exclude and kill.

When the liberals tell us that only solution is to vote in a progressive candidate, we say two things:

While your international and immigration policies dictate whether we live or die, we are dying.

While our friendships and families are being ripped apart, we can never vote.

Instead of living precariously at the whims of politicians and ebbs and flows of their legislation, we need to build the means to ensure our survival regardless of politics and law.

On September 11, 1973, the Chilean Military, backed by the CIA and US government, bombed El Palacio de la Moneda as General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Unidad Popular government. Many UP party members and leftists managed to escape to the US or Europe where they lived in exile. However, those without the economic or social means to immigrate to the “First World” found themselves in jails, torture chambers, or mass graves. While US policies overseas drive migration, US border policy serves to impede it, trapping people in war zones and dictatorships. The liberals around the world who expressed horror and demanded a return to democracy in Chile were blind to the array of non-democratic immigration policies that impacted the lives of Chileans before, during, and after the coup.

“Perhaps the Chilean exile that left the country with only what was necessary had privileges according to the political or cultural status they possessed when some of them could choose the embassy and destination that matched their dreams of picturesque European landscapes. Meanwhile, anonymous shoeless others landed where they were thrown: Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, or the distant Scandinavia, where they were coal cockroaches in the albino sky of the Vikings.”

Now that we are in democracy “within what is possible” according to the former Chilean president Patricio Alywin, the politicians and liberals exclaim: “To make a change, you should go out and vote!” How can we vote out the asshole working the visa desk at the local US Embassy? Did anyone actually vote in the jerk at the consulate who interviews foreigners for five minutes to decide if they are likely to overstay their visa for economic or familial reasons? The same official who has the power to deny your visa application, with no knowledge of your lives and dreams, for being a “would-be illegal”? For a government that claims to be “just, democratic, and transparent,” our treatment at the US embassy matches the treatment we receive at the most arbitrary of bureaucracies in the “Third World.” Forgive us if we have trouble reconciling this fact with government calls for “Law and Order.”

In a global frame, what can democracy mean when we have no influence on the US government policies that affect us? Even as we write this, the Chilean militarized police are armed with drones, amphibian tanks, and tear gas supplied through US foreign aid to be use by commandos trained in Colombia, “El Comando Jungla,” to repress Mapuche land struggles. Mapuche immigrants in the US, like those from other parts of the world, were forced to leave their indigenous territories to escape poverty, starvation, and state repression. When deciding to flee to the US is a matter of life or death regardless of legality, the call for electing progressive candidates as a means to change immigration policy is a patronizing and exclusionary way to tell the rest of the world to put our lives in the hands of politicians.

As a result, while the call to simply #AbolishICE may seem like a radical move from within the state, if it goes no further, it is just a liberal invitation for US citizens to ignore to the rest of the US state’s impact on the lives of those around the world.

To merely #AbolishICE is to shuffle around their roles and responsibilities to other agencies within the array of bureaucratic assemblages—embassies, armies, CIA agents—that exert the state’s force against those who lack US citizenship. These assemblages will continue to existed even if you elect a socialist to your local city council. They will continue to exist if your progressive mayor orders the police to refuse to detain new immigrants when a hundred detainees are still in their city’s jail. ICE has existed for less than 20 years, but the US government has worked much longer to intensify global human suffering through wars, coups, and trade policies. The US government has always detained and deported those who dare to immigrate on their own terms to a country where they believe they have a chance for survival. An #AbolishIce movement built on asking the state to abolish ICE serves to exclude non-citizens from building power.

A movement built on turning the direct action of non-US citizens and their friends—those who are barricading ICE facilities and taking direct action—into a spectacle to elect officials will only enable the politicians win a game we could never play and will never win. We will lose the power we have to survive despite the state, while liberals and politicians buttress the power of the US government.

The only way to ensure our survival is to secure the conditions to meet our needs autonomously. That may mean crossing a border without a government’s permission. This is not a neoliberal call for transnational flows against the power of the state. Currently capitalism is only sustained by the political barriers that divide us. This is a war cry from our precaritized bodies.

The only actions that can insure our survival are those that break the division between citizen and non-citizen, the barrier of paternalism and exclusion. These actions acknowledge that our shared survival is predicated on building autonomy outside of the state and capital. This could mean barricading the entrance to an ICE facility, blocking a deportation bus, or hiding undocumented immigrants from the police instead of pretending that the state will protect them. This may also mean that, instead of hoping an humanitarian organization will care for undocumented immigrants, you go to the prison or detention center to build autonomous and powerful friendships with those incarcerated. Above all, this means building the infrastructure for our shared survival, knowing that state institutions and electoral politics have never ensured and will never ensure that we all live. All attempts at inclusion in electoral politics is built on the exclusion of others.

On either side of a border, whoever they vote for, we are all illegal.

On July 4, a woman climbed the pedestal at the base of the Statue of Liberty during an anti-ICE demonstration. It took police nearly three hours to get her down.

Starting in mid-June, occupations sprang up around the United States in protest against ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) on account of how US border policy breaks up families, incarcerates and forcibly drugs children, and deports millions—in some cases, to war zones in which they have no homes or resources. In the following accounts from the ICE occupations in Portland, Tacoma, and Atlanta, participants reflect on some of the internal challenges facing movements against the border regime.

We urge everyone to support the arrestees in the struggle against ICE in Portland and elsewhere around the United States. For more on how and why borders tear apart families, ruin lives, and create the conditions for exploitative capitalism, read our book, No Wall They Can Build.

Portland: Cracking the ICE

After itching to do something, anything, about the violence being enacted by ICE, I was pleased to hear that some folks participating in the march held on June 17 and ending at the ICE facility at 4310 SW Macadam Avenue in Portland had decided that they weren’t leaving. My first visit to the space that would become the commune was on June 19 in the early afternoon. If my memory serves, there were only a handful of tents, one or two canopies with kitchen and first aid supplies, and perhaps one portajohn. After observing for an hour or two, I approached folks to ask if there was anything I could bring and was asked to supply the encampment with ice and another cooler if possible.

In the hour it took me to run that errand, the small scattering of three or four tents became nine or ten, and the 40 or so people became, by my approximation, over 100.

While ICE agents were still trapped in the building, a pizza delivery person showed up (from Bellagios, I think) to deliver food to the ICE agents. After walking around the building multiple times and not finding a way in, he gave up and left the huge stack of pizzas with the protestors.

When I showed up after work the next day, the camp was bigger still. That day, there was some alarm when DHS (Department of Homeland Security) showed up. People rallied and ran to the front entrance on the Macadam side of the building and were quickly forced aside by DHS. While I chose to stay behind in the driveway, in the event that that was the next target, by all accounts DHS escorted ICE agents who had been trapped inside the building into
their vehicles, with many of the ICE agents covering their faces.

Over the next few days, the camp expanded to include between 80 and 100 tents on either side of the bike path, in front of the main driveway, and spilling over into a field adjacent to the facility—as well as a large kitchen, a childcare area, a communications team, an engineering team, a medical tent, a front entrance check in, and other amenities. The engineering team, with the help of fellow occupiers and community members who delivered loads of pallets and furniture, fortified the encampment with barricades. We also worked on creating a boardwalk of sorts down the trolley tracks to provide a wheelchair-accessible way to reach all the tents providing services and in hopes of potentially creating more space for tents.

On Thursday, June 28, at 5:30 am, DHS tore down the barricade from the door on the Macadam side of the building to the far side of the driveway in order to enable officers and transport vehicles to come and go again. After many days of being shuttered, the building was open again.

I wasn’t able to make it until that afternoon, but the difference was striking. There was still an air of lightheartedness, but the seriousness of the situation was unmistakeable. We had known it was
coming and here it was. I opted to park far away and walk into the camp. DHS vehicles were absolutely infesting the surrounding area. I walked into the camp and immediately spotted snipers on the roof. Small children were yelling at them: “Quit your job!” and “You should feel bad!” There was a line of DHS officers in full riot gear lining the edge of the driveway, facing off with protestors. The engineering team was furiously assembling more barricades. Press was assembled outside the near entrance; I nearly walked face-first into a camera as I was trying to access the sidewalk. Security was tighter. I overheard multiple people who were standing around asked what they
were doing.

Overall, for me personally, it was a tremendously heartening experience. I worked with teams of people who were organized and dedicated. The atmosphere was refreshingly lively and upbeat, with
children running around and people of all stripes showing up to support the occupation with their labor, their bodies, and their time, or just to get a hot meal. I saw anarchists working alongside DSA, and lots of awesome solidarity. I witnessed vital, important work being done toward the goal of dismantling ICE.

That said, the occupation was not without its problems. I heard that comrades were thrown out for tagging the Tesla building and I wanted to find out what had gone down. When I first approached someone from the security team, they seemed as outraged as I was; they took me to folks who might know more.

I found myself speaking to two people. One seemed concerned if not exhausted; the other seemed annoyed if not hostile and eventually walked away from me. I didn’t have a lot of information at that moment, so I accepted that the person I was talking to didn’t either and left it at that. The day of the crackdown (June 28), I approached the person who had walked away from me, introduced myself, and stated that I hadn’t been there to cause problems, that I was genuinely concerned, and that I had more information if they wanted to talk about it. From my end, this was an earnest attempt to make peace with this person. They proceeded to berate me for defending the people who had done the tagging, telling me that it was inappropriate and put marginalized people at risk, that the account I heard from one of the people who were expelled was false. The person I was speaking with kept referring to some sort of nebulous “leadership,” and insinuated that the only reason I was there was
to get the expelled person’s stuff back. When I tried to express that actually I was making an attempt to offer an olive branch, despite our difference of opinions, they told me they were done with me and walked away.

This inability to have a conversation is a big problem. And that conversation is not just about property destruction—we have that one all the damn time. But I had legitimate questions: Was “no property destruction” decided to be a ground rule at a General Assembly? How were new people invited into the space? Were they made aware of the ground rules? (Who has the right to determine the proper form of resistance to an institution that is incarcerating people, drugging children, and separating families?) Was there a protocol established for how to handle violations? Was there
any accountability for people on the security team or in any other position abusing power? I think these are major recurring problems in spaces like this that need to be addressed before we can start
organizing across tendencies in any meaningful way.

Portland and Tacoma: You Can’t Build a Movement Based on Shame

I spent time at both the blockade in Portland, Oregon and the Northwest Detention Center Occupation in Tacoma, Washington. I think it is so inspiring and exciting that these occupations and blockades are happening all over the country. I wish they were happening in every city, at every ICE facility.

At both of these occupations, there were many anarchists with whom I felt affinity; but there were also aspects of these occupations that reminded me of the worst parts of the 2011 Occupy movement—including an intense form of privilege politics that I had hoped we had learned from and moved on from in the past seven years.

One of the most exciting aspects of resistance during times of intense repression and authoritarianism such as those we are experiencing now is the number of people who are radicalized and join anarchist struggles. It is a huge turning point for us—a time to spread anarchist ideas. Newly radicalized people are looking for direction. Often, however, they will follow the loudest voices—and the loudest voices are often the liberals or self-appointed “leadership” of a movement. I have seen both new people and seasoned revolutionaries being controlled by authoritarian privilege politics, accepting them out of fear of being seen as racist—even though most privilege politics are themselves racist, involving self-appointed white leaders claiming to speak for all people of color and claiming that people of color are always peaceful.

This is not to say that racism is not a huge problem in anarchist scenes. But adhering to reactionary privilege politics is often as bad as not addressing it at all.

At the occupation at the Northwest Detention Center, there were moments when the General Assembly was filled with anarchists; at these times, the assembly made consensus decisions to never talk to the police and to not have a police liaison or any sort of security force, and agreed that snitching and sexual assault were the only acceptable reasons to kick someone out of camp without discussion. There were other times when the General Assembly was full of liberals, self-appointed all-white leadership, and even a person who threatened to snitch if someone did anything illegal. These were the moments the camp felt the most stifling. We were told by that all-white “leadership” that the only acceptable action was to build the camp, for example, by cooking and organizing supplies. They maintained that any other actions would harm the people inside the detention center—all of whom, apparently, did not want tactics to escalate beyond cooking and taking out the trash.

To be clear: the NWDC is one of the biggest immigration prisons in the country. How they asked all 1500 people trapped inside it what tactics they do and don’t support was never explained to us. In fact, they could not and did not.

At the Portland occupation, I saw some people aggressively shamed for tagging the Tesla showroom. They were screamed at and kicked out of the entire occupation at 3 am. I also saw those same people later being described as white, although half of them were people of color, because it didn’t fit into their privilege politics narrative to admit that many people of color are invested in confrontational politics and escalation. As they were verbally assaulted and kicked out of camp, they were told that because they had tagged the Tesla showroom, it would be their fault if the police came to the blockade and took children away from their parents.

At the Tacoma blockade, one afternoon, a nonviolent direct action training took place. It began with two white people and one person of color aggressively shaming everyone in the space for the actions of the police. According to them, it was our fault that the ICE agents were torturing and raping people inside because demonstrators had been standing in the street the night before. It was our fault the ICE agents were torturing and raping people inside because a couple demonstrators had been drinking beer.

We must remember that the violence of the police is never our fault. The violence inflicted upon the migrants detained within the Northwest Detention Center, despite being escalated during the protest outside, is still entirely the fault of the police inflicting it.

Many of the people in the nonviolent direct action training were white folks who had never been to a protest before and were heavily influenced by being shamed and told how racist they were. This type of privilege politics, built on shaming people into inaction, is not how you build a movement. It doesn’t build momentum, it shuts it down. It doesn’t inspire people, it shuts them down. Shame is a feeling that does nothing but disempower people, which is the exact opposite of our goal—building power, together.

As I watched the people being kicked out of the Portland blockade that night, the “security team” evicting them repeatedly expressed the belief that if there was graffiti, the police would immediately come and shut down the camp. As if the police wouldn’t come to an illegal blockade if the building hadn’t been tagged! As if the police were allowing the camp to exist because of some morality that the police and the protestors shared, and the only reason the police would come would be if that morality were no longer shared. It was as if they believed that the protestors and the police had come to an agreement, in which as long as the police could trust the protestors to police each other, then the protestors could trust the police not to evict the camp.

But the police can never be trusted, and they will never share our ethics. We know, both from the logic of the state’s position as well as from our experience in past actions, that the police will always come—just as soon as they have the force to do so. However, the amount of force they need to evict a camp or shut down a demonstration often depends on how confrontational the demonstration is. The more confrontational the occupation, the more force the police will need to evict it and the longer it will take for them to amass that force.

One recent example of this is the Olympia blockade, which barricaded an active railroad for 12 days. The entire neighborhood was covered in anti-police graffiti. Cement was poured on the tracks. Security cameras were taken down. Parking meters in the area were broken. At any given time, the most people you might find at the blockade were 50-100 people. At night, it was down to 5-20 people. By contrast, if we count from the first day of the overnight occupation in Portland to the day the ICE building was reopened, the Portland blockade lasted 10 days—and the number of people at that blockade was often up to 1000 or more.

As we can see, the graffiti—and the smashed parking meters, broken security cameras, and so forth—at the Olympia blockade did not cause the police to come sooner. It actually took them longer to come, despite the blockade being only a fraction of the size of the Portland blockade. At the Portland blockade, people were busy policing each other. The actual cops didn’t even need to come. The protestors themselves were protecting the property of the government and the showrooms of capitalism. (Never mind that both the Tesla showroom and the ICE facility are owned by a man who openly admitted to running his Mercedes into demonstrators.)

We are in a time of crisis, in which the overt white nationalist terror of the state is clearer than ever. In this moment, we should build autonomous spaces in which people can take action outside of the control of political politicians and peace police. We believe this because of our political ethics of autonomy, but it is strategic as well. Confrontational tactics are a threat to the state, whereas any protest tactics that do not actually threaten the power of white supremacy can only reinforce it. The stronger we make the barricades, the longer we can hold off the police. The less we police each other, the less power we give to them.

As anarchists, how do we counter the politics of leadership, inaction and shame? How do we build our power even as the liberals and peace police are actively trying to strip it from us?

Atlanta: The ICE Age Is Over

In Atlanta thousands of people gathered early Saturday morning for a “Keep Families Together” march organized by NGO’s and members of the Democratic Party. Currently, several dozen participants in this march are still occupying a plaza outside the City Jail, which doubles as an ICE detention facility. While the group seems set to stay the night, the occupation still has a long way to go to connect with the thousands who took the street earlier in the day.

Strangely, the coalition that called for this march chose to start at the ICE facility, before marching away to go listen to speeches outside of the closed federal building. Surrounding the physical building where hundreds of immigrants are detained seemed like a good start, but the politicians in charge of the rally moved away from the site of real power to a symbolic site. Some participants who had their families in tow were overheard lamenting that the march was a little too tame for them, even with their kids in tow.

Autonomous groups and leftist groups that utilize non-electoral strategies had organized before the large demonstration to continue the march and return to the jail. After the rally was dismissed, a large banner reading “ICE BREAKERS: Chinga La Migra” was stretched across the street along with chanting and drums. Several hundred joined, despite liberal protest marshals attempting to discourage them from doing so. Together, they marched back to the jail, holding the streets the whole way.

Peachtree Street was blocked outside the jail as hundreds chanted and waved to those locked up inside. Cops drove motorcycles through the crowd, but the crowd did not back down; soon, a couch appeared in the streets and people began to set up tents. The atmosphere was festive, with many dancing to music or playing soccer. As the day wore on, the cops slowly began to encroach on the occupation, forcing people to clear the street, confiscating the couch and tents, and violently arresting one person. Numbers fluctuated throughout the day but remained over 50.

As of this writing, the occupation is ongoing, having resisted the initial attempts to push it out. There still remains a lot to do. The terrain of the occupation is favorable to autonomous groups and anarchists because we were the ones to push for it and to make it logistically possible, but unfortunately these circles comprise the bulk of the camp. Democrats were the first to call for an action and they sucked up the spontaneous energy of thousands with their march in the morning, though it is likely that whoever had been the first to call for a march would have drawn a large number of demonstrators.

We were enraged by the concentration camps and sought to catalyze a real movement against them. This energy was enough to enable us to push for an occupation no matter what the circumstance. Now we need to figure out how to bridge the distance between those who carry signs declaring #abolishice and those who want to shut down the ICE facilities themselves. How can the occupations grow, spread, and mutate?

On June 30, on a day of nationwide demonstrations against the brutality of ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and borders in general, fascists mobilized around the United States to march through downtown Portland protected by a massive phalanx of riot police. The ensuing clashes were reminiscent of the fascist mobilizations of 2017—especially April 15 in Berkeley and June 4 in Portland—but even more egregiously violent. Portland police already wrote the playbook on coordinating with fascists, but this time they opened their lines to let the fascists charge demonstrators, then attacked those the fascists had just attacked. From now on, every movement that attempts to come to grips with the violence of the state—such as the recent wave of protests against ICE—will likely have to deal with the violence of grassroots fascists protected by police as well. Let’s organize to make sure we’re prepared for the trouble ahead.

Here follows a full account from our comrades in Portland.

In Portland, OR, on June 30, Joey Gibson, Patriot Prayer, Proud Boys, Nazis, and the usualassortment of alt-right nationalists showed up to hold a “Freedom & Courage Rally” at Terry Schrunk Plaza at 4 pm. The event description was bizarre. It was almost Pentacostal in tone, speaking of “cleansing the streets of Portland” and finishing with a declaration: “WE WILL MARCH NO EXCEPTIONS.” They advertised that they’d confirmed participants from Washington, Oregon, California, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, and Florida, all the while pleading with the Portland Police Bureau for “fairness.” They had been run out of town earlier in June, apparently denied the police protection from anti-fascist demonstrators to which they’d grown accustomed. The irony of an overwhelmingly white ultra-nationalist group whining about “unfair” treatment from the police is hilarious, especially since the Portland Police riot line always faces the anti-fascists and police always attack and arrest anti-fascists—they never attack or arrest the fash. Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand, right?

The demonstration started off as usual. In Portland, the fascists rally on federal property (for their own protection, obviously) in the middle of downtown: Terry Schrunk Plaza. Anti-fascists assemble in the park adjacent to Terry Schrunk—it’s called Chapman Square. Since the police are quite aware of the dynamics involved with the demonstrators, they lined Madison Street, facing the anti-fascists in Chapman Square. As Portland has been on high alert because of the #OccupyICE protests for the past three weeks (and Terry Schrunk is federal), DHS (Department of Homeland Security) officers made their reappearance. They arrived wearing the federal government’s finest repression gear—caged helmets, masked faces, three-foot batons, pepper ball guns, and so on. A notable difference was that this time, the DHS police were organized into different teams, indicated by a stripe on the back of their helmets. The fascists also had their Halloween costumes on, ranging from a full-blown Pepe/Kek worshiper who looked like a wrestler to 3%ers (remember them helping police with arrests last summer?) wearing what looked like real combat gear. And they call anti-fascists LARPers?! Even Based Spartan made a re-emergence.

Anti-fascists taunted them with megaphones and chants, and the Unpresidented Brass Band provided a situationally-appropriate soundtrack, complete with “sad trombone” effects and a sousaphone every time one of the braver fash decided to “come talk” to the anti-fascists. Signs and banners were everywhere, and the bloc was a sprawling front line of roving fighters. The air was electric and numbers were clearly on our side, which always leads to one thing—state repression. One small group of anti-fascists were attacked by the fash, so the police responded by emptying what appeared to be pepper ball guns at the anti-fascists. This set the tone for the subsequent actions of the police.

Twenty minutes later, police announced an official state action and the code under which it fell, and described the potential consequences if anyone chose to violate them. Essentially, they were warning anti-fascist demonstrators what to expect. This is certainly uncommon. It must have taken place because of the presence of major news outlets, and perhaps because the local police were working so openly with DHS. This action was to set up a police line and clear the street adjacent to the fascist demonstrators.

The fascists formed a self-described phalanx, which took about twenty minutes to assemble. Then they immediately began marching towards Chapman Square at full speed. The initial clashes were mitigated by police presence and the speed of the marchers, but there were visible amounts of trash and sticks flying through the air. The fascists turned towards the river, then turned back towards their original direction. It initially looked like they were establishing a serpentine reach, but instead they stopped after several blocks. Anti-fascist demonstrators had kept up with them the entire time, but kept a city block between both parallel marches. Anti-fascists grabbed street signs, barricades, construction barriers, and large sheets of wood to create barricades every time the fash attempted a charge. Then, as the fascists stopped and turned several blocks later, both groups began marching towards each other. A small group of anti-fascists broke off and there was a scuffle, followed by the anti-fascist charge.

It’s important to note that the fascists charged through police lines with the express intention of attacking anti-fascist demonstrators. And the police allowed them to. Remember all that equipment? Nothing was deployed against the attackers.

Today was not a typical day in Portland. This is a good indicator of what anti-fascists are up against. The level of physical and psychological intimidation from groups of goons who train together was overwhelming. This phenomenon should be familiar to us from history. During the previous rise of fascism, state power was transferred to what were essentially street gangs (think of the SS). June 30 was an example of that phenomenon recurring—perhaps the most visible I have personally seen in Portland. The scene was reminiscent of the fascist demonstrations in Berkeley in 2017; but with no police or physical objects to stop the rivers of demonstrators, the initial clash was brutal.

Fireworks and mortars, bear mace, bludgeons, and weighted gloves were among the most visible weapons. The “Berkeley Charge” was repelled by the sheer numbers of the anti-fascist demonstrators and their advantageous positioning, but to be sure—the fascists were there to attack them at all costs. The sheer amount of blood spilled by both sides was unsurprising due to the fascists’ consistent state-backed escalation of violence. There were multiple beatdowns from both sides during this initial charge, and both sides peeled back momentarily. The fash left their front line entirely too far into the anti-fascist line, and they realized it and turned back. The police immediately used flash-bang grenades. Five minutes later, it was a declared a riot.

Both groups continued on the same trajectories as before and met up again several blocks later. The skirmishes continued for the next hour all throughout downtown. Finally, when the crowds arrived back at the original location (Terry Schrunk and Chapman Square), the state was able to repress most of the ant-fascist defense, while allowing the fascists to continue attacking intermittently. Since the demonstration had been declared a riot, state forces effectively cancelled the Patriot Prayer event by forcing both groups to march on the sidewalks. In the final scene, the remaining anti-fascists chanted “BYE BYE NAZIS” as the fascists mounted the singular vehicle they’d arrived in.

Yes, that’s right—the fash brought a big yellow school bus. What version of reality are we in right now? The situation is bizarre, comrades. This is fascism.

It is worth noting the degree of collaboration between the fascists, the police, and the state. All three groups were visibly interfacing, coordinating, and collaborating. The transfer of power and state enforcement has already begun. Everyone should remember that Joey Gibson is a real estate agent and a wanna-be politician, and assuredly there were other politicians and would-be politicians within the Schrunk Plaza alongside him today.

Still, Portland had the numbers and the spirit on its side today against fascism. Anti-fascists gave no platform and no space, and even the state couldn’t protect the fash—although they tried as hard as they could.

The police tried to repress anti-fascists from the start. They attacked, they threatened arrest and violence, they allowed the fascists to stream through their lines to attack us. There was no holding back from either side today. And Portland held it down.

Solidarity with everyone taking action against ICE today! Borders and national citizenship are among the most egregious means of creating inequality. Borders don’t just tear apart families—they maintain a global apartheid. https://crimethinc.com/borders